Robert Rauschenberg

“John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. Nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by their adaptation to change.” ~Robert Rauschenberg

Alec Baldwin shares this quote from an episode of his radio show Here’s the Thing on NPR. I believe the passage is from Rauschenburg’s obituary and can be heard at 29:20 of this podcast. I have almost worked my way through the entire series of very thoughtful interviews. Other shows have featured interviews with Kristen Wiig, Dick Cavett, Herb Alpert, Chris Rock, Lorne Michaels, Erica and Molly Jong, David Letterman and Michael Douglas.

Founded by progressive educator John Rice in 1933 near Asheville, North Carolina, by the late 1940s, Black Mountain College attracted key figures (or soon to be) in the experimental arts: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Josef and Anni Albers, David Tudor, Clement Greenberg, Charles Olson, Robert Rauschenberg, Franz Kline, and Buckminster Fuller. By 1954, the College was on its last legs. In fact, the winter of 1953/1954 was arguably the lowest point in the College’s history. Out of this winter of discontent grew the idea of a literary magazine. Olson had turned Black Mountain into his own classroom and writers like Ed Dorn, Michael Rumaker, John Wieners, and Fielding Dawson attended the college. Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley along with Olson would teach at the College in its closing years.

There were only seven issues of The Black Mountain Review published, as seen in the seven cover images above. I love these covers, and how the publishers began with the idea of a consistent design template with minimal differentiation, perhaps to create an identifiable “brand,” but by issue five their own artistic and experimental inclinations took over, obviously under the influence of John Cage and Franz Kline, and overthrew the rigid structure. It like a visual representation of a mind expanding. Beautiful.

First a brief history of the Kerouac manuscript for On the Road. Kerouac produced the single-spaced text without commas or paragraph breaks on one massive continuous scroll in only three weeks. The 120-foot-long player-piano-like (Jelly) roll (Morton) was created by taping semi-translucent paper together and feeding it through his “That’s not writing, it’s typing” 1928 Underwood Portable typewriter. But oh what a typist he was; according to legend (or Allen Ginsberg), Kerouac was clocked at speeds approaching 110-120 words per minute on the straightaways and perhaps those speeds can be attributed to the “nearness” of Kerouac to the subject matter.

“His subject was himself and his method was to write as spontaneously as possible…What resulted he would later transcribe for forwarding to his publisher, but never revise, in principle he regarded revision as a form of lying.”~The New York Times

“I’m just reading what I wrote all night. There are better things coming than what I wrote all night. Straight from the mind to the voice”.~An excerpt from On The Road, Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road, Rykodisc (1999)

Straight from the mind to the voice. This desire or act of accepting /embracing things for what they are, flaws, flies in the ointment, warts and all, is a reoccurring aspect to Robert Rauschenberg’s work as well. Rauschenberg is perhaps best known for his late 1950s, early 1960s Combines. But for me Rauschenberg’s most significant work besides Erased de Kooning (1953), is his 1953 collaboration with his ‘printer and press’ John Cage entitled “Automobile Tire Print. This 23-foot-long “print” was executed with black house paint, twenty sheets of typewriter paper, and a Model A Ford one weekend on a semi-deserted street in in Lower Manhattan.

Unfortunately it rained. Fortunately it rained. Thankfully it rained. Just by chance it rained and everything was salvaged. Or as Rauschenberg explains in this wonderful 1999 interview at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: ‘And I just poured the paint on the… it rained… and the paste didn’t really hold up too well… yeah I salvaged it all, but anyway it didn’t have to rain… and so I pored it in front and I told John to really… I poured it in front and I told John to drive just as straight as he could you know, be careful, keep going straight you know and John was fascinated by the fact we were doing this and he did a good job.’ Yes a lovely effort indeed.